Also I guess I’ll take the blame for SW:TOR here, as back in 2010 I was calling it an sRPG, and I guess EAWare was listening? My bad. If only SW:TOR was MORE like WoW it would totally be a huge hit right now. Totally.

40 Responses to I ruined SW:TOR I guess

Stupid fans, ruining a game like that in just the three months before release. They are like locust. EA should give each and every one of them their $60 back and tell them where to stick it. That would show them!

What I wanted was KOTOR 3 not the Tortanic. If they wanted to make a starwars MMO something along the lines of star wars galaxies was the best bet. Less Jedis and more jawas. You can’t make a universe where every one is equal to a super human jedis and make it work.

If this is brilliant piece of insight is from one of the guys that SURVIVED 2 rounds of layoffs then they really did have zero clue while working on this game. They’re in fact doomed never to recover now…

I doubt I’ll find time for it even if it does go F2P. It was never the payment model that put me off, nor even the sRPG format. Partly it was the tired old Star Wars I.P. but more than anything it was BioWare, whose approach to RPGs I finally lost patience with after a week of Dragon Age.

Back in the days of Baldur’s Gate they built worlds, or at least small corners of worlds. Now they tell obvious stories obviously, don’t allow for any meaningful flexibility or creativity from the player and offer an entertainment experience that feels like watching a straight-to-dvd movie on freeze-frame.

Amazing how that doesn’t work in a subscription MMO. Just surprises me that it still apparently works in a single-player RPG.

Forgot to mention my usual rant about how the beta forums had 50plus page posts about how the game was bad, too wow like, unintuitive, shallow, aesthetically dead, etc. All of which was ignored. So I assume the fans they refer to are the Bio yesmen they asked for feedback from.

It is the rule of larger populations. You can find a fan for everything.

For example, no matter what horrible, broken, unfair, craptastic feature a dev fixes on an MMO, somebody will pipe up and claim that it is was their favorite thing about the game. I have seen it happen in the forums countless times.

As for expectations, setting those is the job of the studio. If literally hundreds of thousands of people walk away from your game, blaming them for anything, even unrealistic expectations, is a cop out.

There is the possibility EA may simply close SWTOR. It may not be worth investing any more money to change to a F2P model. The bulk of the MMO community has basically abandoned this MMO and most will not come back.

Well yep. This is what you’ll get when you make a Star Wars MMORPG where 50% of your budget goes to voice acting that no one cares about, a world with the visual interest of sand, gameplay from 8 years previous, where anyone can be a Jedi, no sandbox elements, no space combat and no innovative features to speak of (companions? please).

I was actually prepared to give this game a try, way back when it was released. Wasn’t expecting MMORPG gold, but figured I might enjoy the stories. Unfortunately I could not buy or play the game in the country I live in (South Africa) – apparantly EA/Bioware expected such a massive influx of players that they did not release the game in many regions all over the world. Imagine my surprise today when I clicked the “Buy now” tab on the offial SWTOR website (I’m not actually interested, I was just curious). This is what I got:

“Star Wars™: The Old Republic™ is not available in your region

To maintain a high quality of service, only certain regions worldwide will be able to pre-order Star Wars™: The Old Republic™”

So subscription numbers are taking a nose-dive, but still they can’t be bothered to sell the game into the “rest of the world”? A market they judged potentially so large (the rest of the world, not South Africa) that it could disrupt the service in the regions they did release in?

Just for the record, every other MMORPG did release in this country, but not the mighty SWTOR. I guess this is just another small example of the arrogance/short sightedness that resulted in the current mess they find themselves in. I’m not saying it would have saved the game, but they left a lot of money on the table.

You do realise that the original source for this is some anonymous tosser from a comment section on Massively, right? The fact that this gets laundered through a couple of gamer sites and is now sort of an actual thing is astounding to me.

Whatever happens to TOR and its 1.25m Western subscribers in the end, history will record its tale as one where the naysayers ended up considerably more obsessed than the fans.

There’s was a pretty overwhelming group of Tortanic (god that tastes like a fine wine on my verbal palette) supporters until very recently. They all kind of slinked away quietly without a fight as the ship continued to sink (hey there Syp).

Overwhelming? Pity I missed it. It would have been nice to get in on a posse of TOR aficionados and do some overwhelming.

I am not sure how much of a fight one can put up over what is ultimately a matter of taste: one palate’s fine wine is another palate’s cheap plonk. It’d also amount to crude contrarianism to hop on every relevant post on a blog like this one and shout about TOR’s merits, given the host’s implacable (if quite entertaining) dislike of the game and the subgenre which it represents. I’m still subbed and happy, and I can always turn to the Spinkses, Shintars, Targeters, Tremaynes et al whose commentary is generally positive.

Still, I don’t think I have ever seen so much critical passion for any game from those who have never played it. The thirst for TOR bad news, fake or real, is remarkable in some quarters, and it’s not just SynCaine by any means.

“Still, I don’t think I have ever seen so much critical passion for any game from those who have never played it. The thirst for TOR bad news, fake or real, is remarkable in some quarters, and it’s not just SynCaine by any means.”

You are quite correct. And as far as I am concerned, Bioware./EA/LA has no one to blame but themselves. Call yourself the second coming in MMO gaming enough times and you better deliver the goods, particularly when you have killed a game like SWG, beloved to many who would otherwise have been strong TOR supporters. Oh well. I lost SWG, but watching TOR crash and burn is some consolation at least.